Every year, NIJ awards several hundred grants totaling millions of dollars to state and local laboratories to help them improve
their ability to conduct accurate and timely forensic testing.

As administrator of the funds, NIJ must monitor and assess how the laboratories spend these taxpayer dollars and then report
to Congress on what it finds. To help accomplish its monitoring goals, in 2005 NIJ instituted a program to ensure that grantees
(i.e., the laboratories) were correctly documenting their efforts and spending funds according to congressional and NIJ guidelines.

The Grant Progress Assessment program provided free, external assessments to grant recipients from mid-2005 to 2011. During
that time, the Grant Progress Assessment staff examined more than 2,300 awards worth a total of more than $1 billion.

When NIJ suspended the program in September 2011 due to budget constraints, all the players — NIJ, assessors and laboratories
— agreed that the program had been a great success. This article documents the lessons learned.

Goals of the Grant Progress Assessment Program

The program's purpose was twofold:

To assist NIJ in its administrative oversight of forensic science awards

To educate grantees on proper grant administration

The program gave NIJ a comprehensive overview of the awards process as well as in-depth data about grantee performance. In
addition, it gave the laboratories objective, professional feedback about how they managed their funds. Through the assessments,
laboratories came to better understand the program's requirements and special conditions. Over time, laboratory staff were
able to identify potential issues and resolve them before they became problems. They also improved their ability to identify
successes that they could use to secure future funding.

NIJ used the Grant Progress Assessment program to monitor several kinds of forensic science grants:

Forensic DNA Backlog Reduction Program

Capacity Enhancement Program

Convicted Offender and/or Arrestee DNA Backlog Reduction Program

Solving Cold Cases with DNA

Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grants Program

How the Program Worked

On a set two-year cycle, a trained assessor or team of assessors — many of them DNA laboratory managers themselves — visited
each laboratory that had an open forensic science grant.

Using a checklist, the assessors reviewed the status of the laboratory's grant and assessed the grantee's use of federal funds
to increase the laboratory's capabilities and capacities — all at no cost to the agencies. Generally, the assessors spent
two to five days onsite with the laboratory staff.

The checklist included everything from budgets to performance measurement data to deliverables.

Assessment Led to Education

The assessments were conducted primarily to ensure that federal funds were used appropriately, but they had the added benefit
of teaching grantees — many of whom had never received federal funding — how to understand and comply with the rigorous requirements
of their award.

When the Grant Progress Assessment program began, the assessors reported that they were as much educators as evaluators. During
initial site visits, they often found records in disarray, and subsequently they spent a large portion of the visit showing
grantees how to set up procedures for documenting, organizing and reporting the data required for grant compliance. As one
NIJ staffer explained, "You get the quality you inspect, not the quality you expect."

Common findings from the early years of the Grant Progress Assessment program included the following:

Incorrect information on the grant and the financial point of contact

Late progress and financial reports

Purchases that had been made outside of the proposed timeline

Unallowable expenditures

Lack of financial control when it came to commingling of funds

Expenditures from a category not in the approved budget or made without prior approval

Activity in the progress reports that was not consistent with the proposal

By the second or third year that they visited laboratories, assessors began seeing a dramatic improvement in reporting and
compliance. Grantees were more organized; they had proper systems in place. They knew what questions the assessors were going
to ask — for instance, about the validity of equipment purchases or whether agency asset numbers and serial numbers matched
— and were ready with the answers and supporting documentation. As the program advanced, its impact became even more apparent
— adverse findings became fewer and fewer and compliance became the norm.

As for NIJ, a significant discovery from the Grant Progress Assessment program was that what was often thought by assessors
to be a commonplace answer to a question was not always the commonplace answer in the mind of the grantee. During site visits,
assessors played a critical role in bridging the gap in perceptions between the two sides.

The formalized review process introduced by the Grant Progress Assessment program helped both NIJ and grant recipients achieve
their goals of ensuring that grants were being used to achieve the goals and objectives set out by Congress: Improve the capacity
of crime laboratories to solve crimes.

NIJ Journal No. 271, February 2013NCJ 240698

About the Authors

Patricia Kashtan is a program operations specialist in NIJ's Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences. Jolene Hernon is Director of NIJ's Office of Communications. Beth Pearsall is the managing editor of the NIJ Journal.